Interviewer: "Why didn't you just change your image if you felt forced to live up to it?"

Ernest Hemingway: "Do that and you're admitting you've been pulling the wool over the public the entire time. And that's when they really turn on you. Every interview, every photograph, every personality profile had to authenticate your image, even when the facts were cockeyed. 'Here, Hem,' the press boys would say, 'sit next to this dead lion so we can snap one for Lifeówe know you didn't shoot it, but we know you could have. So what if it's not the gen?'"

Presented as a comfortable chat between "Papa" Hemingway and a time-traveling interviewer, this compact little book imagines what it would be like to spend and hour or two with the larger-than-life author over a cup of tea or coffee. The entertaining conversation is purely fictional, yet solidly based on biographical facts.